This one should come in pretty handy while dealing with day to day issues with the very famous Windows Box . Almost 3 out of 10 calls you hear is about memory utilization in most of the cases (a rough estimate based on the experience till date). So what is all this fuss about Memory management and troubleshooting. The word troubleshooting is just an catalyst to this article since its going to be an altogether different ball game.
So let's begin with exploring "that" specific tool which almost most of us are aware of and tend to fetch the very first thing when we want to analyze the memory issues on a windows system. You are right, am talking about our very own "Windows Task Manager". Some might ask what's the big deal about "Task Manager"? Yes exactly, but how many of us really know what those specified numbers actually mean?
Below is a brief explanation of the fields that's shown in the "Performance" tab of Windows Task manager.
CPU Usage - This is pretty obvious, it indicates the percentage of processor cycles that are not idle at the moment.
PF Usage - Indicates the percentage of the paging file that is currently being used. This value is sort of misleading, it actually shows the amount of physical memory/page file space being used by your system. Synchronous to Total under Commit Charge (K).
CPU Usage History - Just a graph which indicates how busy the process has been recently, the number of graphs correspond to the number of cores your processor has.
Page File Usage History - Same as CPU Usage History just for your page file usage since Task Manager has been opened.
That was about the "Graphs" displayed in the "Performance" tab of WTM. Now let's look at the fields arranged in the different zones in WTM. The attached file summarizes the same. The ones marked in red are of more importance.
After all the brief up above, you might wonder so what to do with all these figures? So here is a small checklist that you could follow while dealing with system memory issues.
* If the "Commit Charge - Total" value regularly exceeds the "Physical Memory - Total" value, your system has to rely more frequently on the much slower page file (virtual memory). It's time to add more physical memory.
* If the "Commit Charge - Total" value is near the "Commit Charge - Limit" value then, not only did you use up all your physical memory but also you used up all your virtual memory. Your computer is at its knees begging for mercy.
* If your "Commit Charge - Peak" value is near the "Commit Charge - Limit" value then you are completely maxing out at one point or another during your computer being turned on. Your computer is at its knees begging for mercy once in a while for a few seconds again.
* If your "Commit Charge - Peak" value comes close to or exceeds the "Physical Memory - Total" value, your computer had to access virtual memory once or twice. Performance might not be affected, but you are at the upper limit of using all your memory.
* More than 50% of the core operating system components and drivers can be swapped out from physical memory to the page file, moving such portions of the OS can significantly yield a performance hit. This again indicates the advantage of using more physical memory.
The above article was indeed taken from a pretty good number of other "Performance Management" stuff on the net, but tried to collate the best of the information from them and blend it to one single piece of write up.
Happy Learning,
Rudram (^_^)
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